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DAVID ROSENBOOM (B DAVID ROSENBOOM (b. 1947) IN THE BEGINNING (1978–1981) 80735-2 [2 CDs] DISC ONE [71:16] 1. In the Beginning I: (Electronic) (1978) 23:48 David Rosenboom, Buchla & Associates 300 Series Electric Music Box Live concert recording at the Music Gallery, Toronto: January 19, 1979. 2. In the Beginning II: (Song of Endless Light + Sextet) (1979) 28:37 Mike Svoboda, trombone; William Winant, percussion; Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick, Aniela Perry, Derek Stein, and April Guthrie, cellos Studio recording: January 26, 27, 29 and 30, 2009 3. In the Beginning III: (Quintet) (1979) 18:47 Midnight Winds: Amy Tatum, flute; Jennifer Johnson, oboe; Andrew Leonard, clarinet; Maciej Flis, bassoon; Allen Fogle, horn Studio recording: January 10 and 11, 2012 DISC TWO [55:44] 1. In the Beginning: Etude I (Trombones) (1979) 9:56 — for Toyoji Tomita Mike Svoboda, eight trombones Studio recording: March 11 and 12, 2008 and January 27 and 30, 2009 2. In the Beginning: Etude II (Keyboard-Plucked Strings) (1980) 7:59 — to James Tenney Jane Grothe, harp; David Rosenboom, piano and computer; Jerónimo (Jxel) Rajchenberg, requinto, charango, and coco banjo samples Studio recording: July 30, 2008 (samples at Idyllwild Arts, Idyllwild, CA) and June 6 and 8, 2012. 3. In the Beginning: Etude III (Keyboard & Two Oranges) (1980) 6:15 — to George Manupelli David Rosenboom, piano Studio recording: June 8, 2012. 4. In the Beginning IV: (Electronic) (1980) 12:09 David Rosenboom, Buchla & Associates 300 Series Electric Music Box Live concert recording at Mills College, Oakland: October 18, 1980. In the Beginning V: (The Story) (1981) 5. Movement I 2:49 6. Movement II 2:42 7. Movement III 3:50 8. Movement IV 2:15 9. Movement V 4:31 10. Movement VI 3:11 Amy Tatum, flute; Claire Chenette, oboe; Andrew Leonard, clarinet; Briana Lehman, bassoon; Daniel Rosenboom, trumpet 1; Marissa Benedict, trumpet 2; Steven Suminsky, trombone; Doug Tornquist, tuba; Danny Holt, piano 1; Richard Valitutto, piano 2; Nicholas Terry, percussion 1; Matthew Cook, percussion 2; Andrew Tholl, violin; Mark Menzies, viola; Derek Stein, cello; Maggie Hasspacher, contrabass; David Rosenboom, conductor Studio recording: March 27, 29, 30 and 31, 2012. All compositions copyright © David Rosenboom 1978–2012 and published by David Rosenboom Publishing (BMI). All rights reserved. NO PART OF THIS RECORDING MAY BE COPIED OR REPRODUCED WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION OF A.R.M., INC. THIS SERIES OF EIGHT WORKS, created between 1978 and 1981 and presented on these discs in chronological order of their composition, demonstrate a remarkable extension of David Rosenboom’s techniques from his …Plymouth Rock…1 series of 1969–71 using the harmonic and subharmonic series. Basic numerical relationships are used here to structure not only the melody and harmony of a piece, but also such other primary musical parameters as rhythm, timbre, and musical form. The In The Beginning pieces are artifacts in the development of a full- blown musical model based in all its dimensions on simple harmonic proportions. This can be understood as a kind of total harmonicism, similar but based on a different principle than the total serialism of the 1950s-60s Euro-American avant-garde, where a single generative method is used to structure all possible aspects within a body of music. While such compositional discipline imparts a unity to the core of the music, its musical fertility is revealed by the expressive diversity a composer achieves in applying it. The In the Beginning series provides a narrative of the flowering of such an approach. The story begins in Toronto at York University where Rosenboom taught a class based on the seemingly impossible-to-compare musics of Harry Partch, America’s grass-roots instrument- builder and pioneering harmonist, and Iannis Xenakis, the modernist European technologist of stochastically generated sound-clouds of primal rhythms and noise. But Rosenboom was dreaming of a music that could integrate them, and the class provided the opportunity to discover how. The shape of Partch’s “One-Footed Bride: A Graph of Comparative Consonance” in his classic Genesis of a Music2 is formed by tracing the “psychological classification” of interval ratios, mapping a correspondence between their “qualitative and quantitative factors,” including “approach,” “emotion,” “power” and “suspense.” This posits a linkage between the mathematics of the ratios that define harmony and the human feelings that they engender, not unlike the association of modes and feelings that Rosenboom knew from North Indian raga theory. The music he imagined was based on intertwining resonant clouds, and Xenakis’ Formalized Music3 provided techniques for rendering them. Important among these were the Gaussian distribution, the bell-shaped curve associated with the phenomena of resonance. Rosenboom’s own research in the 1960–70s4 using brainwaves and other physical transducers to control analog synthesizers provided another key element to the mix. Influenced by the work of the scientist-musician Manfred Clynes identifying universal, primary dynamic forms that determine expressions of emotion, he recorded the output of pressure transducers touched by Method actors who were asked to express specific feelings, along with their brainwaves. The outcome was a small library of expressive shapes associated with these emotions that he could apply to control horizontal musical parameters like melody and timbral or dynamic envelopes. This made possible the linking of mathematically defined harmonic relationships and melodic shapes through the similarity or contrast of their emotional associations. Stochastic techniques could be used to create smooth transitions from one set of associations to another. The spinning out of the potentials of this rich system of relationships becomes the story we can track in his composition of the In the Beginning series. 1 How Much Better if Plymouth Rock Had Landed on the Pilgrims, New World Records 80689-2 [2 CDs], New York, 2009. 2 Genesis of a Music, Da Capo Press, New York, 1974, p. 155. 3 Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1971. 4 Rosenboom’s early contributions to this field of study can be found in the book he edited Biofeedback and the Arts: Results of Early Experiments, Aesthetic Research Centre of Canada (A.R.C.), 1976. In the Beginning I: (Electronic) In 1977 Rosenboom came to the San Francisco Bay Area to collaborate with Don Buchla during the development of the Buchla 300, his new digitally controlled analog synthesizer, and its software called PATCH-IV. Once it was up and running, the 300 provided Rosenboom the means to realize his ideas for an expansive harmonic model that would have been impossible with a purely analog device. The 300 Series was based on the analog synthesis modules of Buchla’s classic 200 Series, but added the capability to program complex multichannel sequences of voltages (up to 64 at once) to control them. This allowed for precise coordination of harmonic relationships between pitches, rhythms, and timbres. In the Beginning I focused first on realizing the vertical (harmonic and rhythmic) aspects of his model, leaving the horizontal (melodic) and formal (stochastic) aspects for future pieces in the series. “The master structure is based on a system of proportions that emphasizes irreducible ratios (e.g. 2/11, 3/10, etc.) It exploits both harmonic and subharmonic relationships. The ratios are applied to all musical parameters toward which compositional attention is directed in a given realization.”5 Irreducible ratios of the first 12 integers in both harmonic and sub-harmonic forms are used to control the pitches, rhythms, and timbres of the synthesis system. Subsets of twelve such ratios define distinct sections of the piece; these subsets replace each other gradually, but in quantum steps, to create transitions from one section to another. The formal scheme of seven sections used here and throughout the rest of the series has durations that follow this series of proportions: 1, 2, 1, 3, 1, 2, 1. The clearly generative nature of this number sequence implies the title of the series itself; its circular symmetry was designed to continuously join the last section to the first, returning without juncture to the beginning. The harmonic/subharmonic proportions and progressions used and extended in all pieces of the series are defined in the first piece’s score. They consist of two sets of inversional symmetric relationships. The first set is generated from the harmonic series by folding the last six numbers over the first six numbers: 12 11 10 9 8 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 In the same way, the second set is derived from the subharmonic series (the same numbers in descending order) by folding the last six over the first six: 6 5 4 3 2 1 7 8 9 10 11 12 The second set is presented in mirror image, so that together the two sets define one series of twelve musical intervals (diads) that progress smoothly from largest to smallest (harmonic), then from smallest to largest (subharmonic). These also define a six-note mode with different ascending and descending versions: Db-Eb-F-G-Ab-B-Db (ascending) and Db-B-A-Gb-F-Eb-Db (descending). Note that this provides a total of eight pitch classes, where G and A occur in both natural and flat form; but importantly, this is true only for equal-tempered tunings, since in Just 5 David Rosenboom, In the Beginning I (Electronic) score, 1978, rev. 2012, introductory note. Intonation there are frequency differences between the harmonic and subharmonic notes with the same name. Each section in the seven-part form is characterized by one subset of these ratios that control the selection of its event parameters for pitch, duration, rhythmic groupings, timbre modulation functions, and their durations; that is, there is a tendency within each section for this subset of ratios to dominate, then in the next section the next subset dominates, etc.
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